1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to restructuring documents and more particularly to automatically restructuring SGML documents into card-based documents.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Documentation plays an important role in all stages of a product from design, manufacturing, assembly, to marketing, training, and to operation, maintenance, etc. Technical information is required and shared in all stages of the life-cycle of the product. Due to the advent of various document standards in the recent years, technical documents are being converted, or created from scratch, to conform to the document standards in various industries, e.g., automotive and truck (SAE J2008), semiconductor (PCIS), chemical (CML), air transportation (ATA-100), telecommunication (TCIF/IPI), etc. Different document standards are designed to address the issues at different levels of documentation needs and for different application domains. For example, some standards are meant for representing only the contents of the documents to support structuring of information, while others integrate both the contents and formats to support complex publishing.
Since 1988, a new trend in technical documentation has been emerging to adopt the international standard, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) to define domain-specific document structures, which are then used to represent the content of technical documents. SGML is further described in SGML, ISO 8879:1986 Text and Office Systems--Standard Generalized Markup Language, Geneva, 1986. Documents in SGML separate the content (as much as possible) from the format, so that technical information is preserved, platform-independence is maintained, and can be re-used, e.g., for all products in a product line.